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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

wit, both on the level of the moral law. Both have
meaning only in the " moral " world, just as in the
pre-Christian time a Jew who kept the law and one
who broke it had meaning and significance only in re-
spect to the Jewish law ; before Jesus Christ, on the
contrary, the Pharisee was no more than the " sinner
and publican." So before self-ownership the moral
Pharisee amounts to as much as the immoral sinner.

Nero became very inconvenient by his possessedness.

But a self-owning man would not sillily oppose to him
the " sacred," and whine if the tyrant does not regard
the sacred; he would oppose to him his will. How
often the sacredness of the inalienable rights of man
has been held up to their foes, and some liberty or
other shown and demonstrated to be a " sacred right
of man " ! Those who do that deserve to be laughed
out of court--as they actually are,--were it not that
in truth they do, even though unconsciously, take the
road that leads to the goal. They have a presenti-
ment that, if only the majority is once won for that
liberty, it will also will the liberty, and will then take
what it will have. The sacredness of the liberty, and
all possible proofs of this sacredness, will never pro-
cure it; lamenting and petitioning only shows beggars.

The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he

knows no other enemy than the " immoral " man.
" He who is not moral is immoral ! " and accordingly
reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore the moral man
can never comprehend the egoist. Is not unwedded
cohabitation an immorality ? The moral man may
turn as he pleases, he will have to stand by this ver-
dict; Emilia Galotti gave up her life for this moral

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 71

truth. And it is true, it is an immorality. A vir-
tuous girl may become an old maid; a virtuous man
may pass the time in fighting his natural impulses till
he has perhaps dulled them, he may castrate himself
for the sake of virtue as St. Origen did for the sake
of heaven : he thereby honors sacred wedlock, sacred
chastity, as inviolable; he is--moral. Unchastity can
never become a moral act. However indulgently the
moral man may judge and excuse him who committed"
it, it remains a transgression, a sin against a moral
commandment; there clings to it an indelible stain.
As chastity once belonged to the monastic vow, so it
does to moral conduct. Chastity is a--good.--For
the egoist, on the contrary, even chastity is not a good
without which he could not get along; he cares noth-
ing at all about it. What now follows from this for
the judgment of the moral man ? This : that he
throws the egoist into the only class of men that he
knows besides moral men, into that of the--immoral.
He cannot do otherwise; he must find the egoist im-
moral in everything in which the' egoist disregards
morality. If he did not find him so, then he would
already have become an apostate from morality with-
out confessing it to himself, he would already no
longer be a truly moral man. One should not let
himself be led astray by such phenomena, which at the
present day are certainly no longer to be classed as
rare, but should reflect that he who yields any point of
morality can as little be counted among the truly
moral as Lessing was a pious Christian when, in the
well-known parable, he compared the Christian re-
ligion, as well as the Mohammedan and Jewish, to a